Notes from downstream art exhibition
October 6 @ 12:00 pm – October 17 @ 5:00 pm
Notes from downstream
Exhibition by Adrianne Huang & Elizabeth (E) Trefney
October 6 – 17, 2026
Reception + Artist Talk: Friday, Oct 16th | 6-8P
More About Notes from downstream
If all the world was a river, how would we situate ourselves in its flow? Elizabeth (EJ) Trefney’s work dives into rushing waters and swims among smooth currents, weaving images of the natural world into past and present, distant and familiar. Objects and specimens foreground Adrianne Huang’s work, which prefers to embark on a riverside search, turning over rocks and peering into crevices. Notes from downstream considers both artists’ approaches to questions of observation, collection, and coexistence in an exhibition of drawings, prints, and zines. Elizabeth’s Dawn Chorus and Adrianne’s catalog weave together depictions of material scenes and entities to convey the intangible resilience, magnetism, and intimacy of nature. Looking to ancestral practices and peculiar objects, these projects engage in a dialogue with the natural world through careful depictions of earth, sea, sky, and heritage.
Dawn Chorus tells stories of environmental resilience through a series of cyanotype prints, graphite drawings, and handmade wooden frames. These artworks bear witness to nature’s gentleness alongside its unforgiving strength in wake of climate change. From ancestral homelands in Armenia to the Haw River shoreline in Elizabeth’s backyard, these artworks serve as a collection of regional climate portraits.
A series of ink drawings and handmade zines that resemble cabinets of curiosity, catalog considers the acts of collecting and observing natural and manmade objects. The series works to unpack, and at times remake, structures of categorization by purposefully presenting items in abstractly connected groups, without any discernibly meaningful organization or hierarchy within. Do we seek order by nature, or because we’ve created a world that necessitates it?
More About the Artists
Adrianne Huang
Adrianne Huang works across painting, drawing, and book arts to navigate ambiguity and complex emotional states. With an educational background in Information Science, she is interested in the dissonance between definitive answers and nature’s fundamental uncertainty and impermanence. Making and collecting images is one way of attempting to establish permanence and hold the unattainable, but why are we drawn to preservation and ideas of eternity? How do we know to treasure things before they’re gone, or when to let them go after? An exploration of how and why we make sense of objects and experiences, and in doing so, establish a boundary between rational and arbitrary, emerges as an undercurrent in her work and refracts in many directions. Connections between unexpected subjects and settings evoke tension and ambiguity, like scenes from a vivid, constantly shifting dream. Objects of personal fascination – tropical plants, fish, the Chinese zodiac, and human figures – become stand-ins for comfort, regret, and the elasticity of time. Stranger than life but more familiar than fantasy, her images question the act of “making sense,” serving as wish fulfillment, dream diary, self-critique, and catalog of curiosity.
Learn more: huangadrianne.myportfolio.com | IG: @hngyrn
Elizabeth (E) Trefney
Handwritten letters, rocks pulled from a river, dried leaves: Elizabeth (EJ) Trefney combines physical memories with depictions of nature to tell stories of climate change, Armenian heritage, and, above all, caregiving. To tell these stories, she creates narrative-based artworks using cyanotype, graphite drawing, laser-etching, or, most commonly, a combination of these mediums.
The symbols in the foreground of EJ’s artworks are sourced from family & public archives or hikes in the North Carolina woods. As a public health & social services professional, science and caregiving are inevitably at the core of her artwork. The act of creating is tied deeply to research: How can Armenian oral tradition help us tackle today’s (un)natural disasters? How can the geology of Haw River rocks teach us about balance and evolution?
While using familial Armenian handwriting or ancient rocks from my Haw River backyard may seem like an act of perpetual care to our ancestors, EJ’s goal is to create a meeting place in the present. She calls on ancestral wisdom and science as a joint solution to modern environmental crises, and hopes the ephemeral and often deeply personal symbols in these projects can be used to form a connection not just to nature but to each other.“From heart to heart there is a path.” – Armenian Proverb
Learn more: elizabethtrefney.com | IG: @ejtref
Free
